Austria and other margins

Austria and Other Margins: Reading Culture offers a series of case studies that redefine what "reading culture" can mean in literary and cultural studies. Four of Arens's essays trace how authors borrow and rewrite literary traditions across national lines, in order to address problems in their own cultures' histories. Heimito von Doderer rewrites Dostoyevsky; Morike, Hildesheimer, and Peter Shafer offer competing Mozarts; John Irving draws narrative impetus from Gunter Grass; and Robert Wilson confronts German theater audiences with US culture from the 1930s on. In the second set of essays, Professor Arens illustrates how literature can cross other kinds of cultural boundaries, especially those between disciplines. Stifter's work on educational psychology lies at the basis of his narrative strategy; Schnitzler's familiarity with popular psychology suggests new ways to read his character portraits; plotting a story as if it were on a stage allows Grillparzer to tell two simultaneous stories at odds with each other; and two artists interested in large-group art (Christo and Judy Chicago) manipulate their images as modernists to achieve different careers. The volume is easily accessible to a general audience interested in a spectrum of popular and canonical authors, in the cultural history of Central Europe, and in those intellectuals who draw on that heritage in the English-speaking world.